


Beneath This Armor

by tolakasa



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Preseries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-29
Updated: 2007-07-29
Packaged: 2017-11-28 22:49:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/679753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tolakasa/pseuds/tolakasa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wore his wedding band like armor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beneath This Armor

He wore his wedding band like armor, and expected it to protect him. After all, what kind of woman went after a man who was so far gone in his grief that he never took it off and still remembered to check for it every morning, even when he forgot minor details like his name or Social Security number?

She did.

He knew, deep inside, that he was a hopeless romantic of the worst kind; he believed that a man should marry for life--a belief compounded by the tragedy that had stolen his love. No world that was so harsh, so violent, so uncaring as to tear her away from him would be so generous as to give him a second chance.

He was struck a second time, almost exactly the same way as before, by a woman as far different from the first as could be; light and strong and tall, her eyes blue instead of Debra's bottomless black.

He fought it. Fought her. Used every trick he knew, from basic indifference to pure rudeness to outright misogyny, but it turned out, in the end, that she knew better than he did. Eventually, he had to admit it. Had to admit that she had won, and that he was lost, and that the heart he had sworn to one woman forever now held a new love beside the old.

Deep inside, he knew it wouldn't last, though once he surrendered he lived the love as well, as loyally as any man could.

He wore his second wedding band like armor, like the first, and like the first it failed when it was most needed. It was gold, not silver, and it died in fire, not icy water.

There would be no third time. Fire tempered the gold into the armor it should have been, and it never left his finger again. No matter how terrible the injury, how deep the inebriation, his sons knew not to try to pry it loose.

He should have told them. So many times he should have told them. But the time was never right, not even when Dean found the silver band in their meager possessions, one time when he did the packing because John couldn't stand without collapsing.

He should have explained it then. Should have taken it away from Dean and slid it back into its box and left it at that. Dean would have listened. He might not have understood why his father kept this one bit of silver when all the other jewelry had been melted for bullets, but he had trained his son to obey without questioning.

Instead, he let Dean have the ring, told him nothing about it, and promised himself that some day he would explain everything. Explain Debra and the flood that tore her from his desperate, frozen grip before their family ever came to be; explain the daughter who was never born and the years lost in a haze of alcohol and engine grease; explain that not falling into that haze again after Mary, that forcing himself to go on, even with only vengeance to hold him up, was a victory in and of itself and everything else was far, far more than a twice-shattered man had any right or reason to expect.

But some day never came.


End file.
